Today, the strange tales of Onoda and Yokoi. The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

I wonder if Hiroo Onoda's story isn't a parable for
our times. 1942 found twenty-year-old Onoda working for a Japanese trading
company. Japan had just gone to war with America so he was drafted into the
Japanese army and trained as a guerilla.

Onoda was eventually sent to the Lubang Islands in the Philippines. When
Americans landed there in 1945, he was a lieutenant in charge of just three
soldiers. Their mission: to head into the hills from which they would harass
the enemy any way they could, and destroy food supplies.

The war ended a few months later, but they had no way of knowing that. So
they fought the only enemy in sight, Philippino farmers. And they did a lot
of damage -- killing and burning rice supplies. One of the four surrendered
in 1949. The rest soldiered on, but authorities now knew who was raising all
the havoc, and why.

They tried to convince the group that the war was over. They dropped photos
and letters from family members. But that had to be a propaganda trick; Japan
never would've surrendered. Another of Onoda's men was shot in '54, and the
last one killed in '72.

Finally, a young Japanese named Suzuki went to Lubang, set up a tent, and waited.
When the lone Onoda arrived to shoot him, Suzuki talked fast. Not fast enough
to convince Onoda, but fast enough to save his own life. They struck a deal:
Suzuki would find Onoda's old commanding officer, who would come and order
Onoda to stop fighting. Only then would Onoda know the war was over. It was
done; and Onoda came out of the hills in 1974 saying:
"We really lost the war! How could they have been so sloppy?"

He returned to Japan a hero, but not everyone in the Philippines was happy about
it. After all, his little group had killed some thirty people in peacetime. So
President Ferdinand Marcos issued a pardon. Onoda wrote his memoirs, married,
raised cattle in Brazil for a while, and was still living at this writing.

Onoda's war appears to've been the longest of many such cases, but not by much.
Shoichi Yokoi lasted until 1972 on Guam. His situation was very hard. Guam is
larger than Lubang and Yokoi was not provisioned and equipped for Guerilla warfare.
He escaped into the hills when the Americans came, and subsisted, not as a looter,
but as a hunter-gatherer. He wove his clothing from hibiscus fibers. His first
statement was a bit different from Onoda's:
"I am sorry I did not serve his majesty to my satisfaction."

How, we wonder, were these soldiers, and others like them, so unequipped to make
sense of the facts around them? Both lived by a strong and principled code of
simple belief. One can only admire such dedication to principle. It's the
simplicity part that deluded them. The world is complex. Simple answers are
surely the best answers, but only when they've been squared with all
the facts. What we know has to evolve as new evidence unfolds.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.